Pubdate: Wed, 30 Apr 2008
Source: Vancouver Courier (CN BC)
Copyright: 2008 Vancouver Courier
Contact:  http://www.vancourier.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/474
Author: Allen Garr
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?196 (Emery, Marc)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/decrim.htm (Decrim/Legalization)

CAPRI WANTS CLOCK TURNED BACK

It's a rare moment when you find Marc Emery and the Vancouver Police 
Department in agreement. But that's exactly what has happened in the 
fallout after the latest annual marijuana smoke-in on the lawns of 
the Vancouver Art Gallery.

It took none other than our municipal scold, NPA Coun. Kim Capri, to 
bring these two together. And in doing so she has given us all 
further insight into what Project Civil City is all about. The annual 
rally of pot advocates gathering at the Vancouver Art Gallery has 
taken place for a decade. Emery, the self-proclaimed Prince of Pot, 
is the organizer and he dutifully gets permission from the gallery 
and a permit from the city that this year cost $1,500.

Emery says there has never been a complaint about the event from 
people who turn up to see it. And he adds, if you really want to see 
chaos, try the Granville entertainment district on weekend nights 
when drunks roam the street looking for fights. VPD spokesman Tim 
Fanning agrees that the rally, which this year attracted more than 
6,000 people at its height, is monitored and managed by the police 
and relatively trouble free.

But Capri told reporters she finds this celebration of cannabis 
culture and calls for legalization of pot "disturbing and 
unacceptable." (She apparently had nothing to say about her boss, 
Mayor Sam Sullivan, and his history of buying heroin for junkies and 
giving a crack addict money so he could smoke the drug in Sullivan's 
van. Talk about disturbing and unacceptable.)

But people puffing on pot is quite another matter for our leading 
lady of law and order. She wants the cops to have a stronger presence 
at these events. This demand has led Fanning to ask: "What are we 
supposed to do? Arrest 6,000 pot smokers?"

The last time the Vancouver cops charged into a crowd of dope smokers 
was in the summer of 1971. They were spurred on by hippy-hating Mayor 
Tom "Terrific" Campbell, who in turn was heated up by the rants 
against the evils of the weed and degenerate youth by hard drinking, 
chain-smoking iconic radio talk-show host Jack Webster. Cops on 
horseback cracked skulls and made arrests in what came to be known as 
the Gastown Riot.

A lot of smoke has passed through the old hookah since then. But 
judging from her comments, Capri would have us go back to those days 
and have us ignore how times and attitudes have changed. Canadian 
politicians are now, more often, calling for the legalization of pot. 
And anyone would tell you the drugs Jack Webster and Tom Terrific 
regularly consumed--alcohol and tobacco--are responsible for far more 
damage than the stuff being sucked back on the art gallery lawn.

For Capri to equate that annual event with the "open drug market" at 
Hastings and Main is disingenuous in the extreme. Her idea of a civil 
city is a place where everyone sits facing forward with hands folded 
on their laps and their legs crossed at the ankles, and where 
homeless people are swept off the streets by private security guards, 
panhandlers are busted and laws are obeyed even when they are stupid.

Capri may be in a minority, but she is not alone. She is joined in 
her crusade by B.C. Chamber of Commerce president John Winter. He 
told the Province editorial board the cops should have thumped those 
dope smokers: "In a perfect world the police would have dealt with 
them with some severity."

To Winter's dismay, "the police don't have the support of the 
community," to go in and bust heads. Fortunately the cops are well 
aware of that and so is Marc Emery.

Contempt for the laws that make marijuana possession a criminal 
offence is obviously widespread. Until those laws change, the police 
have found a civil way of dealing with that problem. Capri's solution 
would have us increase enforcement which would be anything but civil.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom